Yesterday's Des Moines Register contained the following great guest column
from Retired Register Editorial Writer, and long-time Sierra Club member,
Bill Leonard. Right on!

Lyle Krewson


    
Columnists - opinion
Someday, we'll regret damage to our planet
This crisis barely gets a nod in politics

By BILL LEONARD
RETIRED REGISTER EDITORIAL WRITER.
September 20, 2004 
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Ask a sampling of voters to name their primary concerns, and Iraq and
terrorism will likely top the list. Also-rans will include soaring health
costs, crime, joblessness and whatever else hits the headlines with
regularity. An issue such as the survival of the planet gets a cursory nod
of concern only if somebody brings it up.

Polls show that Americans support efforts to conserve resources and protect
the environment. But those issues seldom are afforded "crisis" status. They
are problems we'll have to deal with "someday."

€ Someday - after the last tree has been cut from the last acre of
wilderness to feed the insatiable greed of the loggers, and after the
mudslides from the clear-cut mountains have destroyed the last trout
streams.
€ Someday - after Yellowstone has become a barren ground for off-road
vehicles, and all the national parks have been sold off (for peanuts) to the
mining interests.
€ Someday - after tax-supported agricultural programs have replaced the last
family farms with factory farms whose stench has made outdoor Iowa a health
hazard.

€ Someday - after we have exhausted the oil reserves with no regard for the
future medical need for petroleum-based plastics. And burned away the last
of the world's rain forests, which generate a good share of the global
oxygen supply and store a good share of its carbon, and whose rare plants
have been the source of miracle drugs.
€ Someday - after we've seen the West go dry in response to decades of
wasting precious water on irrigating surplus crops and golf courses - and
discovered that while nobody was paying attention, the public has been
steadily losing control over fresh-water supplies.

We have not only sanctioned the disposal of our heritage, we have
gift-wrapped it. We still follow an 1872 mining law to give away public
mineral rights. Taxpayers have shoveled huge subsidies to the loggers who
have thus far destroyed 95 percent of America's native forests. Yet those
who suggest protecting the remaining wilderness for hunters, hikers,
fishermen, campers and dwindling wildlife are castigated as obstructionists
by the exploiters and called environmental wackos by talk-radio's
liars-for-hire.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration hides its campaign to dismantle
environmental protection behind beneficent-sounding programs called "Clear
Skies" and "Healthy Forests," and compromises existing
environmental-protection laws by simply refusing to enforce them.
One of the most crucial elements in the desperate battle to save the world's
resources is population control, an obvious imperative in a world that every
day posts a net gain of 220,000 souls, a huge share of them born into hunger
and hopelessness. Yet again this year, President George W. Bush vetoed an
appropriation of a modest $34 million to the United Nations Population Fund.
The money would have paid for modern contraceptives, programs to reduce
infant mortality and the spread of disease. But a perceived political
obligation to the implacable foes of family planning and women's rights
brought the third such Bush veto in three years.

The late David Brower, three-time Nobel nominee and patron saint of the
Sierra Club, said that "overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing
us, and immigration is part of the problem." But when immigration policy
became an issue in this year's national Sierra Club board elections,
proponents of limits were shouted down as racists.
"As a consequence," said Sierra Club board member Ben Zuckerman, "the entire
U.S. environmental movement has been cowed into silence."
***

There is no denying the utmost importance of the "crisis" issues that will
decide the coming election. But all of them can be dealt with, albeit often
at a snail's pace, and at a sometimes-frightful cost in human suffering and
money. Ignoring the environmental crisis, by contrast, can render it
incapable of solution, because much of the destruction is irreversible. The
rare plant that went up in smoke today when its rain-forest habitat was
torched just might have held the secret to a cure for cancer. The meandering
stream that was straightened into a drainage ditch will never give back the
acres of topsoil it took with it when straightening increased its slope and
velocity and caused it to cut miles of huge gully.

The ultimate example is North Africa, once part of the Mediterranean's
"Fertile Crescent." Centuries ago, heedless residents so abused their lush
surroundings that the garden became the Sahara Desert - incapable of
recovery because the destruction changed the entire subclimate.
We know better now. But that seems not to deter us from pursuing the same
scorched-Earth policy whose cost we heedlessly dump on our grandchildren.
The single most important and pervasive moral obligation facing mankind is
to ensure survival of a healthy planet for our grandchildren and theirs. We
owe an incredible debt to the past, and an equally incredible obligation to
the future, for the protection of the awesome gifts nature has bestowed. The
political movement, the social order, the religion that won't recognize and
act upon that obligation fails the most solemn duty.
     
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___________________________________________________

Lyle R. Krewson
Sierra Club Conservation Organizer
6403 Aurora Avenue #3
Des Moines, IA 50322-2862

515/276-8947
515/238-7113 - cel

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